Katya Kazakina scored with her look at Oscar Murillo’s market in February. So she’s back again profiling the artist in the wake of his candy factory installation piece at Zwirner. But the real find in the story is the quote from Lenore Schorr, an early collector of Basquiat, who validates the comparison between the two artists that has done so much to propel interest in Murillo:

A stack of metal crates in the center of the room is filled with the chocolate coated marshmallows called Chocmelos. Murillo designed the silver wrapping stamped with a yellow smiley face. Visitors can take the candy for free through the show’s run through June 14.

The crates filled with Chocmelos are for sale at $50,000.

On the opening night, top New York collectors were spotted grabbing and pocketing Chocmelos.

“People could not be stopped,” Doreen Remen, a co-founder of Art Production Fund, a New York-based nonprofit that commissions public art projects, said the day after the opening. “There was chocolate everywhere. Of course you lunged for it.”

Lenore Schorr, an early collector of Murillo’s work, said she came to the opening to lend her support.

“It doesn’t look like he needs much support,” she said as she glanced around the packed room.

Schorr and her husband, Herbert, are collectors of Jean-Michel Basquiat, to whom Murillo has been compared. […] “It wasn’t so much of a spectator’s sport then,” Schorr said about art openings in the 1980s. “We didn’t have the flipping-in-six-months kind of situation.”

Artist Murillo Denies Stardom With $50,000 Candy Crates (Bloomberg)